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How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
by Ben Goldfarb
Book Reviewed by:An eye-opening account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager.
Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.
Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California's mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania's car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.
Today, as our planet's road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world―and how we can create a better future for all living beings.
Introduction
The Wing of the Swallow
If you've ever driven across the United States of America, you have passed beneath the wings of a plucky songbird—smaller than your palm, light as your pocket change, feathered in jaunty blue and umber—called the cliff swallow. Where other animals flee the human footprint, cliff swallows shelter in its tread. Petrochelidon pyrrhonota should properly be called the bridge swallow, for our steel spans have furnished it with more nesting sites than bluffs and canyons ever did. Once a bird of the western mountains, in the last century cliff swallows have spread onto the Great Plains and across them, plastering their gourd-shaped mud nests to girders and trusses, feats of avian engineering no less impressive than our own viaducts.
"Once the environment is ruined," a biologist named Charles Brown told me, "all we'll have left is rats, cockroaches, and cliff swallows."
Cliff swallows are gregarious birds whose colonies can number in the ...
Figures on deaths and disruptions are disheartening, but the author shows how scientists are actively working on meaningful improvements to help animals and roads better coexist, such as wildlife crossings, from passages in Canada's Banff National Park to the famous Liberty Canyon Overpass in Los Angeles. With its veritable mascot, P-22, a celebrity mountain lion who died of injuries sustained from being hit by a car, this project shows it is possible for humans to enact major infrastructure changes for wildlife's benefit. It also encapsulates one of the book's strengths—introducing us to the people working in obscurity to make the paved world less deadly for other species...continued
Full Review
(758 words)
(Reviewed by Rose Rankin).
Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy
A truly important and landmark book on a subject whose full impacts continue to be disregarded or underestimated in considering conservation efforts. Crossings is a moving, compassionate, and indispensable guide to navigating the issue of wildlife survival―and our own. Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts
Ben Goldfarb approaches our fellow animals with delighted curiosity and rare perception. A deeply researched, wonderfully vivid, and genuinely hopeful book. Tom Vanderbilt, bestselling author of Traffic
Like some David Attenborough of the asphalt, Ben Goldfarb has written a fascinating guide to understanding the wilder side of roads, both symbols of freedom and harbingers of unnatural selection.
As Ben Goldfarb notes in Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, we're in the midst of an insect apocalypse. It's largely agreed now that our planet is experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, and insect species are among the most imperiled.
Habitat loss is a critical component, driven by road construction and its attendant development, as Goldfarb explores in his book. But for some species, he observes, roads have become an important albeit perilous refuge—monarch butterflies, for example, migrate and survive along Midwestern roadsides, one of the few places where the native prairie plants they rely on for food and nesting still survive.
Prairie used to cover millions of acres from Texas to the ...
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